


Holes (and the way you fill them)

by TrappingLightningBugs



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Memory Loss, Mild Sexual Content, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-09 03:50:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11661039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrappingLightningBugs/pseuds/TrappingLightningBugs
Summary: "Holes," a symptom of radiation sickness that plagued their world, usually only affected those in high-risk professions.But, as Baekhyun's world splits, showing him visions of a warzone, of a stranger's life, the only new thing in his life is a stranger that keeps popping up everywhere he goes.





	Holes (and the way you fill them)

Baekhyun discovered his first Hole in the middle of a shift at his restaurant, when a man approached the cash register and his immediate impulse was to punch the guy in the nose.

Forcing himself to retain decorum, he delivered the restaurant’s greeting on autopilot, mind sifting through his memories at rapid speed, trying to match a name to the face.

The man himself bit his lip halfway through Baekhyun’s spiel, expression paling like he would faint or like he could sense how badly his server wanted to dock him.

“Excuse me, but do I know you?” The man asked, ignoring Baekhyun’s inquiry.

“I don’t think so.” Baekhyun forced a cheery smile and repeated, “Now, table for one?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Scooping up the menu, he rattled off the daily specials, stomach swooping like his body was determined to harm the man in some way—even if it meant puking on his shoes.

“Your server will be with you in a moment.” He bared his teeth in what was supposed to be a smile. “Thank you for choosing A Light in the Dark today.”

Stiffening, the man’s eyes dropped to his nametag, reading it over again.

As Baekhyun turned away, the man spoke his name in a muted voice, and darkness flooded the restaurant, ripping him from reality to what looked like a poor television connection during a storm.

Static rushed across his vision, blurring into stars, and he heard twin voices speaking his name just like that, one ear in the restaurant with the polite clinking of silverware, and the other somewhere with rustling leaves and impending danger.

Snapping back into his body, he strode away from the stranger without looking back and charged into the staff bathroom, barely getting the seat of the toilet up before he began to vomit.

 

\--

 

‘Holes,’ a symptom of the lingering radiation sickness from the end of the world, had a laundry list of potential causes so long that they felt more like an urban legend than an actual medical side effect. Baekhyun hadn’t ever experienced one before that day, and he worked in his restaurant every single day, under the same conditions—so the only variance was the man.

When he paid his bill, Baekhyun sent one of the new servers to ring him up, not wanting to face him again, though after he left, Baekhyun grabbed their copy of the receipt.

“Kim Minseok” was the name on the card, and he kicked himself for seeking it out, giving his ailment a name. Thankfully, just hearing the name didn’t trigger another bout of nausea or rage, though the experience left him avoiding his customers for the next week, concerned that any of them might produce the same reaction.

But, being mindful at the restaurant wasn’t enough; he left his apartment early one morning to buy a coffee, and his vision began swimming as he stood in line.

The back of the man’s head in front of him flickered in and out of focus, and another Hole yawned, panic from another world seizing him. Anger tore at him, a remembered bite of resentment as his sweaty palm gripped the one in front of him.

Remarkably, when the man—the stranger from the restaurant—turned, he was smiling, eyes wild.

Baekhyun staggered back out of line, a hand pressing to his mouth, and he ran for the shop’s bathroom, knocking a woman out of his way.

Bursting through the door, a man at the urinal cursing at him, piss spraying over the wall, Baekhyun stumbled to the trash can, vomiting long and hard into it, body shivering with the overwhelming sensation of wrongness.

“Shit,” the man spat, finishing his business. He left without washing his hands, but as the door flapped out, another person slipped in.

“Hey,” a voice, familiar and not, spoke cautiously. “Are you alright?”

His head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, so he rotated just enough to see the stranger—Kim Minseok.

Baekhyun panted, trying to force his body not to toss stomach acid, and used his illness as an excuse to examine the man without speaking: He was taller than him and handsome, his hair dark and cut short, his cheeks soft and eyes dark—dark like a madman or animal, and intoxicating. The stranger wore a soft, caramel-colored suit that offset the wildness to his features, and the moment lasted too long, as the enigma of a man prompted him:

“Sir?”

Yanking his attention from the man’s features, eyes gliding down the line of his throat, Baekhyun watched the man swallow before he answered:

“Baekhyun.”

“O-kay. Baekhyun. Are you alright?”

“Not even slightly.” He exhaled. “I need to open and prep.”

“That’s where I’ve seen you.” Baekhyun wondered if he imagined the relief in the man’s voice. “You worked at that restaurant down in Hickory Square.”

“Yes. And am working today.”

Minseok pursed his lips, pouting them in a manner far too cute for a grown man. Again, the world flickered and Baekhyun moaned in the back of his throat.

“You can’t work with food if you’re throwing up. That’s the fastest way to give a lot of people the stomach flu.”

“And what?” Baekhyun slurred. “Are you gonna force me not to go in?”

“I’m going to offer you a ride home,” Minseok crossed his arms, “and remind you that getting customers sick is a good way to go out of business.”

“What makes you think I can’t drive myself home?”

Without pausing, Minseok replied, “Because you don’t know how to drive.”

They both froze, recognizing that something was wrong with his sentence.

“That is—” Minseok tried to recover, eyes flickering to the garbage can, thumbs picking at his suit’s pockets where they hooked into them. “You can’t drive yourself home like that. You might as well be drunk.”

An over-exaggeration, but Baekhyun threw up again before he could argue.

Minseok slung an arm around him, assisting him, but every time Baekhyun stumbled against him, the nausea clotted in his throat, thick like a smothering cloud of smog.

His hearing split in both ears again, and when they left the coffee shop, they stood in the middle of a decimated street, smoking craters and half-exploded tanks everywhere you looked. Bodies, too—piled up on top of each other, missing limbs, charred.

“I’m going fucking nuts,” Baekhyun stated, hands grabbing for Minseok’s sleeve, clawing it with his building, insurmountable horror.

“What’s wrong?”

When he glanced up at the man, either to apologize or to ground himself, he expected Minseok looking at him like he had gone crazy—not an army, enormous guns hefted and pointed at the pedestrians.

He started screaming, the sound harsh and far too high-pitched for anything his vocal chords should have been capable of producing.

They separated like Baekhyun punched, his arms and fingers spread in an attempt to calm his hysteria. “Breathe. Baekhyun, it’s okay.”

People stopped; cars pulled over and numerous mouths asked him with varying degrees of suspicion if he was okay, if he needed something.

Most turned to Minseok when he couldn’t find his words, and someone must have called the ambulance, because the world flickered until the cool, off-whiteness of the little room closed him in.

As they hooked him up to an IV, they questioned him about possible triggers and his medical history, in an attempt to find something concrete to treat amidst unfettered panic and tests they could only administer so fast.

Not seeing the need to lie, he told them about the stranger in his restaurant and then in the coffee shop, frowning when they exchanged a glance.

“Holes.” He said it for them, not enjoying their attempt to lock him out about his own condition. “The radiation.”

“Yes.” The girl leaning over him offered a sympathetic nod. “The doctors can fix that, thank god.”

The other worker fiddled with his IV, slipping him some sort of tranquilizer as the world grew fuzzy—more like when he smoked weed and drank, rather than the times where he saw Minseok and the world split.

Baekhyun stayed in the hospital for three days, embarrassment simmering under his skin as he called off from his own restaurant, asking his oldest servers to open and close, hating himself for acquiring an illness he couldn’t control. He hated being idle, but the doctors’ tests often left him weak or in pain, body like a rag doll’s.

At one point, in a fever dream, he swore he heard a doctor talking about him being destabilized and the potential need to neutralize him. They must have meant with medication, but his skin pricked all the same, instincts aware where his consciousness floated on a cloud of drugs.

Visitors floated in and out with his awareness, one leaving flowers, though he didn’t know a single person that would bother. His head chef and resident best friend, Park Chanyeol, would never buy him flowers—alcohol, maybe, but not flowers.

“Flowers die,” he could imagine the giant muttering. “What if it’s an omen?”

Baekhyun laughed to himself, despite knowing how unstable it would look, bored enough to not care. Despite his grueling, six-day work week, by the second day in the hospital, he couldn’t even nap the hours away anymore.

When they finally discharged him, his paranoid dreams withdrawn behind his rational thoughts, the doctor prescribed him an antipsychotic, warning him to take the pills until they ran out and to schedule an appointment in about a month’s time to determine if he needed them refilled or not. They spoke to him with delicate phrasing, and if Baekhyun’s suspicions didn’t play into the symptoms of radiation poisoning, he would think they were talking to him like he was mentally ill, not physically sick.

Taking the slip of paper, he followed the steps to collect his first bottle of pills that same day, taking advantage of his unwanted day off to do that and grocery shop while he waited for the pharmacy to fill his order.

As he shopped, he began to wish he called in the order from home and made a special trip to pick them up—because he swore every other person in the store was casting him strange looks.

“It’s the paranoia,” he muttered to himself, the list of symptoms the doctors gave him fresh in his mind. “Why would anyone look at you this much? Sure, you look good today, but the bags under your eyes are the size of canyons. Maybe they’re offended by your butterface.”

That drew a laugh out of him, and when the woman inspecting a box of children’s marshmallow cereal shot him a look, he knew he hadn’t imagined that one. Somehow, that helped.

When the wait time passed, Baekhyun returned to the pharmacy, grabbed his pills, and skedaddled to the check out, wanting to be home in front of his laptop, with an entire box of chicken just for him.

And so he did; there was nothing out of the ordinary on his way home, nor for the remainder of the night. He swallowed his first pill with his dinner and went into work the next morning, feeling brighter, though it took him longer to shake off sleep, and by the end of the week, no residual symptoms plagued him. His poor servers were given extra time off that week to compensate for the hours he’d asked them to pull with no warning, and he picked up their shifts, happy to be functioning the way he knew he should be—and if the world occasionally fizzed out on him, at least he wasn’t fainting or being assaulted with horrific images.

Three weeks into the month, with only minor, muddled dreams remaining of his episodes, Baekhyun resumed his usual duties, wandering the dining room during dinner shifts, asking the customers if everything was satisfactory for them.

In his journey, he moved to pass a table at one point, seized by the sudden urge to use the bathroom, and he promised he would resume in the spot he left off, but as he passed the table, a hand reached out, catching his attention in his peripheral vision.

“Hey,” the familiar face of the stranger, Minseok, filled his line of sight when he turned, his voice buzzing at a frequency almost too low for Baekhyun to hear.

He blinked, the motion taking twice as much effort as it normally did, and he drew back, a sick feeling coiling in the pit of his stomach. “You.”

“Me.” Anxiety filled the stranger’s handsome expression. “How are you?”

Breezing around him, leaning away from his touch like one might from a leper, Baekhyun offered him a professional, polite smile. “Much better. Obviously, I’m approved to be around food.”

“Mm.” Minseok’s eyes flickered. “And the visions have stopped?”

Baekhyun didn’t remember if he’d told him about them, but he must have. Or, Minseok liked to read medical books, which wasn’t impossible.

“Yeah, the weird attacks haven’t returned.” Part of him wanted to add _“but I haven’t seen you since then, either,”_ but he refrained.

“That’s good,” Minseok cleared his throat, glancing away like some societal pressure forced him to do so. “And everything’s seemed normal? No fuzziness or distortion?”

A cold sweat broke out across Baekhyun’s shoulders. “Why? Are you a doctor?”

Minseok wet his lips. “Of a sort.”

Alarm bells rang in his mind and he drew further back, aware he was fleeing, yet unable to stop the motion. “Well, it was good to see you again. Enjoy your food.”

It looked like the guest wanted to say something else to him, but he held back, his sharp gaze finally freeing Baekhyun, who turned tail and retreated to the kitchen.

He threw himself into work that night, assisting every station to the point where Chanyeol kicked him out of the kitchen, frustrated with him being underfoot, and then Baekhyun locked himself in his office, refusing to return to the dining room even to ask one of the servers if Minseok left. The man hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate, and causing a scene over a feeling he had just seemed like a quick way to be returned to the hospital, every bit the mental patient he swore he wasn’t.

By the end of the night, and especially after the doors were locked, Baekhyun returned to his senses, the pleasant buzz from his pills filling him with a comforting, reassuring noise, stroking him like one would a nervous dog.

When he locked up at the end of the night, waving to his busboys and dishwashers, and walked to his car, he didn’t notice the person standing around the side of the dumpster, who grabbed him and pressed a gloved hand to his mouth.

“Shh,” the stranger, Minseok hissed to him. “I know this looks bad, but please don’t scream.”

Baekhyun’s eyes bulged and he tried to draw in a lungful of air, but then Minseok shoved his glove—leather—into his mouth, gagging him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the betrayed look Baekhyun shot him. “I couldn’t think of any other way to do this, and we can’t have much time, so I’ll cut to the chase: You don’t trust me because your episodes happen around me, right?”

More than anything, he wished he could tell him that he didn’t trust him because his instincts—proven correct the moment Minseok hid behind a dumpster to grab him—told him that something was off with the man.

Seeming to sense a fraction of that, Minseok glanced away, around them, like anyone beyond lost tourists would be lurking so late in a business district.

When he turned back to him, his expression tense with urgency, Minseok began talking frantically, “You saw stuff. Or heard stuff. When you saw me that first time. Stuff that made no sense in reference to where we were. And I would bet you’d never had minor hallucinations before that point, not even slight ones, and you didn’t have any other visions away from me.”

 “Radiation sickness doesn’t cause hallucinations.” Wild emotions swung in the man’s eyes and Baekhyun tried to stomp his foot on his instep, but Minseok crushed him closer, the muscles in his arms tight, toned, and somehow felt larger than they looked.

Fuzzies flickered at the edges of his vision and Baekhyun whimpered, knowing instinctively that another vision was pressing in on him and the pills could only do so much.

“You know what’s craziest?” Minseok’s voice flickered, warped, and he heard a stern voice calling his name from afar. “You had those visions, but the first time I saw you, I knew your name. Without seeing your nametag. I knew you were Byun Baekhyun, ‘the Whisper.’ Does it mean anything to you?”

He gagged on the glove, spots glowing at the edges of his vision, and he could feel the visions pressing on his inner ears, like a drop in air pressure in an airplane—but what was an airplane? Why would he know those things?

“I know who you are,” Minseok promised, and for some reason, the touch of the man, brutal as it was, was superimposed against the sensation of strong arms around him, tender, as if after love-making. “The memories came so easily the moment I touched you. And I remember more, now—but yours are stuck, aren’t they?”

Baekhyun flailed weakly, feeling like he would pass out, and then who knew what would happen to him.

“Try to remember me,” Minseok pleaded. “Try to go without the pills. Lie and tell them you’re taking them.”

When he managed one last glare up at the man, his vision going dark, he saw Minseok, muscles thick, delectable really, in a tight silver and black flight suit, his hair disheveled and messy, looking both stern and fed up.

For some reason, his last image was of laughing at the imaginary-Minseok, before the world slid to black.

 

\--

 

“—hyun, wake up.”

Head tilting to the side, the light through his eyelids already blinding, Baekhyun grumbled dispassionately at his companion, a smile tugging at his lips when the voice chuckled.

Lips brushed over his brow. “Let me see those pretty eyes.”

Eyes opening, Baekhyun retorted, “That’s gay.”

“Guilty.”

Panic surged through him as Minseok leaned down and kissed him, his lips pliable, the hand on his shoulder burning hot against his skin. Baekhyun tried to yank back, the bed beneath him too thin to be his own, the strangeness of his environment crashing over him, but his body refused to obey, and instead he felt the tension leave his body, like it knew and trusted the creepy stranger.

Breaking the kiss, Baekhyun murmured, as if he rehearsed the lines enough to just know them, “I know it must be serious if they sent you to wake me up.”

“No,” Minseok brushed a disobedient curl from his line of sight, “I just wanted to see you.”

His eyes twinkled with affection, and Baekhyun noted the skin-tight suit once more, the fabric delicious over the line of Minseok’s shoulders and chest. Yanking his thirsty mind back on track, the world beginning to unravel at the edges, Baekhyun could only watch as his hand rose to chuff the underside of Minseok’s chin, his voice asking, “Do you think they’ll miss you if you’re gone a little longer than planned?”

“Perhaps,” he chuckled, capturing his hand and pressing a kiss to the palm, “but who cares? We’re flying in—”

The dream disintegrated then, the vision bursting like a soap bubble, and Baekhyun repeated the scene once more, though now he recognized one of the visions, more vivid and violent than previously, and his location: Behind the dumpster, reeking, at his restaurant.

Grateful no one found him after Minseok jumped him, he rushed to his car, unlocking it with shaking hands, not understanding and not wanting to.

His lips burned with the memory of the kiss, as he desperately pleaded with the universe to never let Minseok and he cross paths again. Somehow, it felt as if Baekhyun would split to pieces if that would happen.

 

\--

 

The drive home scared the absolute shit out of him: Every acceleration, the road would disappear and turn into the sky, clouds stretched out in front or below him, and the sensation of calm ease would disappear every time he’d snap back into his body, nearly side-swiping parked cars.

When he nearly ran a red light, Baekhyun yanked his car to the side of the road and abandoned it, vowing to march the rest of the way home, no matter how tired he was, so he could take his pills and attempt to regain the homeostasis Minseok ripped away.

Each footfall elicited a hallucination of sound, with thousands of other feet falling in formation with his, Baekhyun just knowing they followed him, that a majority of them would follow him off of a cliff if he so detoured.

He didn’t recognize his apartment when he reached it, at first. After a painful, lost moment, Baekhyun fumbled with the door’s lock, tears welling up in his eyes. His Holes felt less like psychotic breaks and more like windows into another man’s life.

Though why Minseok thought _he_ was that man, he had no idea.

 

\--

 

Marching up to his apartment, nearly having a panic attack when his frenetic steps brought on another episode, Baekhyun tried to blink away the vision of charging up steps, men on all sides of him, and bursting through an apartment door, not his own, to _____ on the other side.

The Hole in his vision stopped him, feet still clad in shoes, in the center of his room.

Despite the terror of his ride and walk home, Baekhyun relieved himself and prepared for the night, following his skincare routine to the T, without taking a pill. He didn’t dump them, but he ignored them, his heart thundering in his chest. Why should he listen to Minseok, a crazy man? A stranger?

 _Because,_ his body seemed to be telling him, _he’s not a stranger._

 

\--

 

He slept so fitfully, Baekhyun called off work the next morning, apologizing to Chanyeol and his head server, sending in one of his managers earlier, with a promise to pay double time. Dreams bled and coagulated at random, giving him snapshots of the other man’s life, as he had taken to calling them: Chants of that nickname, “the Whisper,” the tackiness of blood on his hands, the wailing, unending pain of losing someone important, the adrenaline thrill of doing something bad and getting away with it—

And Minseok; always, fucking Minseok.

In his dreams, the man would refer to him by name only when they were alone, Baekhyun picking the details with ease (it was “Captain” in front of others). And, when he awoke, he swept his bangs straight back off his face, a habit he’d never curated and had never done before that day, he was sure. Yet, his body moved like it was a familiar gesture.

Inhaling, wondering if his high levels of stress triggered the visions, Baekhyun attempted to slow his breathing and heart rate, only to find himself seated on someone’s strong thighs, bouncing on the man’s cock. Sweat stuck to his body, the breathlessness of a good fuck stilling his breath, a pair of arms around his torso grounding him.

Wrenching his eyes open, he heard his own voice, broken with pleasure, crying out for Minseok, the man clutching him to his chest like his most precious possession, dark eyes liquid as he thrusted up again, again, again.

“No—” he whimpered, mind half in and half out of the vision, eyes welling up with tears. “What did he do to me?”

But the Baekhyun in that vision loved the touches, loved how there was no distance between them. Perhaps he brainwashed him in the past—perhaps he was in his apartment right now, undergoing strict hypnotherapy to love a stranger who had become obsessed with him. But, he doubted it, and that scared him most of all.

Stumbling to the bathroom, he down four of his pills, uncaring that he doubled the dosage, and collapsed onto the tiled floor, refusing to move until they kicked in.

His living room clock ticked, each beat slamming down like a hammer, and Baekhyun squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to rip the batteries out of the damn thing, but when he steeled himself enough to stand up, he was in a windowless room, the walls rough without wallpaper or decorative paint, shaking and producing dust mites.

“I think the bombs are slowing down,” he murmured, though he had no clue what his own words meant.

“Yes,” another man was by his side—not Minseok—and that calmed him more than he could express. “They’re just blindly dropping them, after all.”

Seized by the intense need to know, he tried to ask the man where they were and what they were doing, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, he commented, “I hope our fighters are okay.”

“I feel like we would have heard the explosions if they weren’t,” the man snorted.

“True.” Baekhyun glanced upward. “God, I wish we could return fire.”

“That would sort of defeat the purpose of staying hidden.”

“Still, could you imagine the look on those bastards’ faces? If they saw how big and competent the rebellion is? That so many people think the Great Leader is cruel and want to put an end to him? It might change minds.”

The man—Kyungsoo, he recalled suddenly—shook his head. “All in due time, Baek.” He shook his head. “I swear, war wears people out, but you—”

“Me, what?”

He shrugged, but didn’t glance away, to his credit. “You’ve flourished.”

“The promise for revenge will do that to a guy.”

Kyungsoo hummed. “Normally revenge burns people out.”

A shy smile crossed his lips, and he didn’t try to hide it from Kyungsoo. “I can’t afford to burn out.”

“Yeah, no kinky sex for burnouts.”

He swatted at the other viciously, the vision dappling, replaced with the sight of his apartment, the forgotten sound of Kyungsoo’s laughter drifting over the acidic scent of stomach acid.

Sometime during the vision, he’d thrown up all over the floor.

 

\--

 

Baekhyun could barely move for the remainder of the day; he curled up on his couch, all of his blankets piled on top of him, and he attempted to watch television, attempted to doze or work on the restaurant’s supply orders, but that was finished too fast, and the other two things couldn’t hold him for long.

Eventually, when night slipped over the world, Baekhyun considered crawling into his bed for another fitful night of sleep, when the buzzer to his apartment rang.

Freezing, picturing Minseok forcing his way in, he crept up to the intercom and pressed the button, hating himself when his voice squeaked: “Yes?”

“Open the door, Baek.” Chanyeol. Thank the powers that be.

“I’ll be down.”

Scooping up his key, Baekhyun scrambled downstairs, starving for company to distract him from the visions that played out all day, too afraid to swallow more pills after almost choking on the prior ones mid-vision.

Arriving at the front door, drawing his heavy coat tighter around him, he opened the exterior, bulletproof glass a smidgen, just enough for Chanyeol to slip in, a large pot clutched in the man’s hands.

“Figured if you were sick again already that you could use some real food,” he beamed at his friend, and Baekhyun melted, always weak for people who wanted to take care of him.

“Sounds good.” He gestured for Chanyeol to follow him.

They played catch up about work while they rode the elevator up, Chanyeol’s concerned gaze sweeping over him more than a few times, but exhaustion possessed Baekhyun so wholly that he couldn’t rebuke him. Instead, when Chanyeol asked him how he was feeling, he admitted to throwing up and being unable to get warm.

“I could stay over, make sure you don’t choke on your own vomit?” His friend offered in his usual tactical way.

He snorted, hating himself for desiring the company, as he usually prided himself on his independence. “Maybe. Let’s see if your cooking doesn’t kill me first.”

They settled on his couch, their chat becoming more mundane as they sipped at the hot broth of his food, heated up on Baekhyun’s stove. Only once they both ate their fill did Chanyeol say, “So, that one customer stopped by, today.”

“Which?” He was still smirking from their earlier talk about Mrs. Choi and her multiple boyfriends.

“The handsome, short one,” Chanyeol pursed his lips, “he left me a note for you.”

Ice curled at the corners of his mind, panic yawning huge and inescapable, as Baekhyun gulped. “A note?”

“Yeah.” Chanyeol proffered a small, crisp triangle of a thing, Baekhyun’s vision flickering at the sight of it, splicing into four different images of the same piece of paper, the settings varying in each.

Taking it, he unfolded it, the room’s lines bleeding together around the corners of his vision as he read the words.

_If you followed my advice, Captain, I think it’s time we talked again._

_You can find me here every night from midnight to 1am._

Color blanching from his cheeks, Baekhyun crumbled up the note, not noticing until Chanyeol’s quiet “hey” snapped him from his reverie.

“What’s it say?”

After his friend read it to him, Chanyeol whistled, “That’s cryptic as shit.”

“I think it’s supposed to be.” He tried to swallow, but his throat felt like sandpaper.

“Are you in any kind of trouble, Baek?”

Said man glanced up, shocked. “Trouble? Why?”

“You’ve seemed out of it for the past…I don’t even know how long know.” Chanyeol’s eyes bored into him, causing him to shift uneasily. “It all started with the day that guy first came to the restaurant. Did you fuck him, and now he won’t leave you alone? Do you need help?”

“What?” Baekhyun swallowed, those words the most he’d ever heard from Chanyeol at once. “I—” Did he? Minseok practically stalked him some nights, and Baekhyun made himself sick listening to him, in response to him.

If he spoke to someone about it, they might lock him up—and then he would be someone else’s problem.

Baekhyun had no idea why the thought knotted so tight in his stomach.

“No,” he decided. “I don’t think whatever’s going on with me is his fault, specifically. More like I had this…thing that I was able to ignore before.”

“So you’re going to see him?” Chanyeol’s eyes widened.

“I think so.”

 “Do you want me to go with you when you do?”

Baekhyun hated the thought of putting his friend in potential danger, but he couldn’t fault the logic—if Minseok finally tried something crazy, Chanyeol was bigger than them both, and probably a match for the stranger. Well, Baekhyun assumed.

“I do.” Swallowing, sealing his fate, Baekhyun asked, “What are you doing after work tomorrow?”

 

\--

 

Arriving at work in jeans, ignoring the taunts from his staff who had been there long enough to know what they could get away with, Baekhyun nodded to Chanyeol, the man staring too hard at the rather utilitarian clothes, knowing his friend dressed that way because he sensed trouble.

Sensed the need for effectiveness over style.

Not that he didn’t rock the classic button up over jeans, but Baekhyun could feel the way the denim clashed with the dress pants the rest of his staff had to wear, and while the servers might pout about that, he could barely pay them any mind.

His job blurred past him that night, the duties so insignificant that Baekhyun questioned his commitment to his restaurant, so focused on meeting Minseok that nothing else mattered—the table that the new server forgot to bring the appetizers to, nothing; the couple that claimed to find hair in their salads, nothing. Baekhyun’s world had broken apart somewhere along the line, and he could no longer care.

After closing up and storing everything where it went, Baekhyun forcing himself to focus, as his employees didn’t deserve to lose their jobs over his negligence, he matched pace with Chanyeol as they walked a block over to the dumpster behind the bowling alley, Minseok camped out with an unlit cigarette, no one paying him any mind.

Seeming to sense them coming, he dropped the cigarette and ground it out with a practiced motion, before veering toward them, his hands pushing deep into his pockets.

“That was faster than I expected,” he hummed, glancing between the two. “Are you prepared to talk?”

“Yes.” Baekhyun cleared his throat, chin jutting out defensively. “I want to know what’s going on with my visions and what you’re doing to me.”

Minseok took a deep breath. “Well, first of all—I might trigger the visions, but they’re not my fault.” He glanced between his two listeners. “We should start walking. We don’t want to stay in one place for two long. And they probably bugged your car and apartment, since you went to the hospital.” He guided them further away from the restaurant, but Chanyeol stopped him before he could take more than a few steps.

“I have a car?”

“That works.”

So, Chanyeol led the way, as Minseok began, “I’ll start easy.” He paused, ensuring he held them both rapt. “You’ve had your original memories erased. Or, covered up would probably be a better term. That’s what ‘Holes’ really are.”

Baekhyun glanced at Chanyeol, disbelieving, but Minseok continued with no concern for the additional party: “They condition you to gloss over the things you can’t remember—Holes happen when something triggers a past memory so strongly that it penetrates through their programming. For you, that happened to be me, because I was there in a lot of your memories over the past few years.”

Swallowing, Baekhyun commented, “You feel like a weird predator. Maybe you trigger them because I can sense your intentions. You’ve been stalking me pretty much since day one.”

Chanyeol and Baekhyun’s cars came into view and Minseok sighed, “Once I started to get my memories back, I just—I know it was wrong, but it felt like you were the only real thing in this town.”

“Cheesy,” Chanyeol quipped as he unlocked his car. “You know, maybe you should prove you’re not a serial killer _before_ you get in my car.”

“That’s a good idea!”

“Alright…” Licking his lips, Minseok tilted his head so Baekhyun couldn’t see his eyes, before saying, “You have a mole on your thigh, behind your knee. When your pants rub it too much, it burns like a bitch, but you were always scared of surgery, so you never got it removed.”

Mouth dropping open, Baekhyun swallowed his shock, but Minseok anticipated his rejection of the information and continued, “You had a little sister that you haven’t seen in years. You were convinced she died in the carpet bombing of Bucheon—until, well, they discovered she was related to you and wanted to taunt you.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Chanyeol demanded, while Baekhyun reeled from another Hole, peeling the topmost layer from his brain, showing him images of a sweet girl, her eyes his own.

Minseok shook his head. “Your car.”

Silence dropped over them like a curtain, Baekhyun’s arms circling his torso, eyes steadfast in not meeting Chanyeol’s, unable to comfort his friend when the rug pulled out from under his own feet, and he was still falling, hadn’t stopped since the day he found his first Hole.

When they piled in the little, beaten-up car, Minseok finally answered, “Our part of the world has been at war for about five years now. ‘They’ are the opposing forces.”

“Any place specific you want us to go?” Chanyeol cleared his throat.

“Yes. The river. Follow it south.”

Chanyeol shot Baekhyun a concerned glance in the rearview mirror, as he sat in the backseat with Minseok, the best option to stop him should he try anything against Chanyeol.

“Why would these people care about us?” Baekhyun asked, once the car started moving.

“Because you’re one of the resistance’s top commanders.” Minseok maintained eye contact baldly, his emotions somber and nonreactive.

After allowing a moment to adapt to the bombshell, Minseok told them the rest:

“All of the cities in this country are held under a truce: People fleeing the warzones can come here and not have to worry about bomb threats or the regimes. However, to ensure people don’t infiltrate this country to work here for their own purposes, only people whose memories have been erased can live here.”

The car bumped along the road, throwing Baekhyun and Chanyeol together, the former not bothering to steady himself, as Minseok threw the laws of his existence into sharp relief.

“So if I’m here, that means I actively left the rebellion?”

Rage tightened Minseok’s posture, Baekhyun unsurprised that he could read the man, too overwhelmed by everything else.

“No—you were captured in our last battle. They sent you here, arguing it was more humane than executing you, but then they projected images of you to our troops, showing them how futile war is, that one of their captains abandoned the fight to live a normal, wholesome life. How _they_ could have a return to normal, wholesome lives for themselves if they surrendered.”

“Propaganda,” Chanyeol said, seeming surprised he understood the concept.

“Exactly.”

“Well, if the memory-wipe thing is true, how do _you_ know all of this? Did you infiltrate this country?” Baekhyun demanded, using his manager voice on Minseok and watching with awe as the man’s spine straightened.

“No. I was sent here by our people to retrieve you—they modified my memory so that it would return in chunks once I encountered you.”

Baekhyun glanced out the window, trying to see where they were, but the darkness and speed of his car prevented that. Images flickered in the blankness; lines of men in robes, receiving diplomas—dressed in uniforms and saluting. “So, now that I know everything, where are you taking us?”

Chanyeol’s hands fisted against the material of the steering wheel, the line something out of a cheesy book, yet still utterly terrifying.

“You and I are leaving,” Minseok answered. “Chanyeol has the option of coming with us, or getting dumped on the side of the road, if you trust him to keep his mouth shut. He could tell people I forced you and him into his car at gunpoint. An easy lie.”

Feeling the taller man’s eyes on him, Baekhyun weighed his options, and asked, “He’ll be put under surveillance after this, won’t he?”

“Most likely, yes.” He shot Chanyeol an apologetic look in the rearview mirror.

“Then we have to take him with us.” Baekhyun swallowed his guilt. “He’s an awful liar.”

They drove in silence after that, Chanyeol refusing to speak, and Baekhyun couldn’t blame him, hating himself for yanking his friend from his life with no warning or chance to say goodbye.

He wondered who Chanyeol might have been, before.

“Why did you call me the Whisper?” Baekhyun asked, after Chanyeol pulled over and switched with Minseok, letting him drive, while Baekhyun climbed into the passenger seat. The taller man dropped into a listless sleep in their silence, head hanging at an uncomfortable angle, and didn’t wake now as conversation resumed.

Minseok smiled, the brightness spiting the exhaustion lining his features. “It was a nickname—an epithet given by enemy commanders. They tried to demonize you with it, but you always loved the concept of it. Sometimes you would make these—poetic verses about it, when you would get nervous.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Like: ‘I am the silent scream of liberty that most will never hear.’ Shit like that.”

Baekhyun pressed a hand to his mouth, trying not to laugh. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. You were always so cheerful, even when you had to fake it.” A blush flamed hot across Baekhyun’s cheeks, as he listened to Minseok talk about him. “It was great for morale.”

Without fear for the first time, Baekhyun yearned for his memories—ached to remember this man who smiled when he talked about him, who let people tamper with his brain for a chance to find him—

“Minseok,” he cleared his throat when his voice rasped, “what were we? Before?”

This time, the man didn’t turn from the road. “How much do you remember?”

“I remember you kissing me.” Baekhyun closed his eyes, but when he checked Minseok for reactions, the world was blurred, sliding out of focus. “I remember—us, together. Having sex.”

Nodding, Minseok murmured, “We were romantic. Together, I guess.”

“You guess?” Baekhyun laughed, quieting after Chanyeol stirred.

“Yeah. We shared a bedroom most nights, but I never moved my things in.” Rain plinked against the windshield and Minseok flipped the wipers on. “We would kiss and touch, but we never talked about it. I think we were both scared of making it official in a warzone.”

“Did you love me?”

The silence at that question stretched so far that Baekhyun worried he might have dissociated into another memory, but Minseok finally spoke, after turning down a gravel-heavy dirt road:

“I did.” _I do,_ the words redoubled in memory.

Then: “When we get back, will our doctors be able to fix my memory?”

Chanyeol stirred, grumbling at the bouncing of the car, as Minseok confirmed, “I think so, yes.”

“Then don’t sound so hopeless yet.” Baekhyun squinted, swearing for a moment he saw a large, metal hub through the trees, a silent promise to match the hope in Minseok’s eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, all comments and kudos are appreciated!


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